Tag Archives: unitedstates

I just discovered NPR’s “Americandy: Sweet Land of Liberty,” a series of stories about regional candies from around the U.S. Some obvious ones make the cut—GooGoo Clusters, Valomilk, Idaho Spud, Cherry Mash, Nut Goodie, Rocky Road—but I’m excited to learn about a bunch of others that I’d never heard of. Chukar Cherries, Chewie Pecan Praline, Melty Bar, Chocolate Charlies, Red Coconut Balls, Needhams, Modjeskas, sponge candy…these are all news to me. Every time I travel someplace new, I scour corner stores for regional candies. Now I’ve got a bunch of new candies to be on the lookout for. →

Big Think: What’s the Plural of Texas?When Texas joined the union, it was with the condition that they have the ability to form four additional states from their land, allowing a total of five Texases. That's a right that they've never given up, which has resulted in occasional movements in support of Texas divisionism.

Kevin Drum: Climate Skeptics Take Another HitPhysicist, climate change doubter, and climate skeptic poster child Richard Muller thinks Al Gore's exaggerating and doubts the accuracy the hockey stick graph. Funded by the Koch Foundation, Muller started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to do his own climate research. BEST published its first paper this week and concluded that Earth is warming very rapidly, that historic temperature data reconstructions are accurate, that global temperature stations are highly reliable, and that the urban heat island effect is irrelevant. Said Muller: "Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK." Well, that's awkward. This is how science works.

Reuters: More Americans believe world is warmingA poll conducted by Reuters has found that 83% of Americans believe in global climate change, compared to 75% last year. That includes 72% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats. It's the #1 concern of 15% of people. 27% believe that humans have nothing to do with it, while 71% figure it's caused at least in part by us. That dwindling percentage of people who don't believe in climate change is more hardened in their position than ever, with 53% of them being certain that there's no such thing as climate change. Let's see how that works out for them.